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IBM collaborates with the EU |
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IBM has announced a collaboration with the European Union on two separate projects – called ACSI and PINCETTE. While ACSI aims to extend open source and cloud technologies to allow businesses to take fuller advantage of e-services for collaborative business operations, PINCETTE is aimed at bolstering the reliability of complex systems.  The ACSI project is the acronym given to a research consortium comprising IBM, the European Union, industry and academia, which aims to help businesses more easily take advantage of Internet-based services - or "e-services" - to create collaborative business operations and achieve shared business goals. The effort focuses on the development of a new computer science model that will enable organizations to accelerate typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the automation and efficiency around deploying new e-service blends. The research will enable even small to mid-sized businesses to create or join into flexible e-service blends, without investing in expensive IT expertise. The initiative will create open-source software to enable many organizations around the world take advantage of the technology. In the consortium, IBM researchers are collaborating with experts from: Sapienza Universita degli Studi di Roma, Italy; Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; Imperial College Of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; University of Tartu, Estonia; Indra Software Labs SLU, Spain; Collibra NV, Belgium. Called Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), the project tackles the challenges faced by most e-businesses today in simplifying and streamlining the costly process of blending multiple, separately managed e-services into a dynamic, organic whole. The consortium plans to demonstrate that the new framework can reduce the cost of creating industry-specific service blends by 40% over conventional techniques. In a separate statement, IBM also announced a second collaboration with the European Union on a project called PINCETTE, which is aimed at bolstering the reliability of complex systems to reduce costly computing errors. A three-year collaboration with the EU, industry and academic partners will see IBM help in creating new technology designed to bolster the reliability of mission-critical system upgrades by detecting and eliminating errors before they have a chance to result in system failure or complication. Plans include sharing the results of the research project with the open source community. IBM said that much like personal computers, large, complex systems that manage electric grids, nuclear power plants, transportation operations, and water pipes require periodic critical upgrades to their software. Unlike a single-user PC operating system, the consequences of a glitch in system upgrades can be global and costly. PINCETTE – meaning 'tweezers' in French for the technology's unique 'tweezerlike' ability to flag and eliminate even the smallest software bugs across large networks – aims to dramatically reduce the costs associated maintaining new system software by automating the often complicated analysis and testing processes. Estimates today put costs associated with validating new software between 40% and 70% of a system's life-cycle cost. The consortium partners, led by IBM Research in Haifa, include: University of Oxford, UK; Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Switzerland; Universita' degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (UniMiB), Italy; Valtion Teknillinen Tutkimuskeskus (VTT), Finland; Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI), Israel; and ABB, Switzerland and Germany branches. The European Union-funded PINCETTE research consortium will introduce advanced engineering and management capabilities for networked systems that have high reliability requirements. PINCETTE industry partner ABB, developer of software that runs a major share of Europe's power grid operation will begin applying these new tools and techniques to their own applications to boost their software upgrade reliability. Additionally, VTT, an industry partner in Finland, will apply PINCETTE methods to software that guarantees the correct functioning of robots that monitor the operation of a future thermo-nuclear reactor – a 30-year project conceived and financed by the European Union, whose goal is replace nuclear reactors by the new generation of clean and green reactors based on the energy of atomic fusion. Israeli industry partner IAI will use PINCETTE to ensure the reliable upgrade of embedded software of electro-optical equipment (cameras), installed on unmanned aircrafts (drones) used to detect forest fires, search for missing people in the ground, sea or snow, and report on runway weather conditions. |
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